As you plan to deploy mission critical business applications in cloud, the first thing that comes to mind is how can all the pieces of the puzzle (infrastructure, business apps, supporting tools etc.) be put together to get all the expected benefits and efficiencies, without introducing any negative tradeoffs. This requires that all the key differentiating technologies campaigned by the vendors to win your business should collectively work as a single solution, be scalable, easy to operate, and not introduce new complexities in your environment.

While individual technology focused documentation and scalability guidelines from vendors are great resource for getting in depth information about any particular technology, a lot of times they fall short of providing you the end to end solutions focused big picture. The most popular question I hear from customers is… “How would the Cisco Datacenter Business Advantage and our open ecosystem partner technologies work together as an end to end solution that provides value to more efficiently achieve the business objectives”? Few days back, I discussed the relevance of Cisco Datacenter Business Advantage technologies to your mission critical business applications.

To efficiently deploy and run the next generation cloud solutions (and the hosted business applications) with confidence, customers require architecture guidelines on the best possible way to put all the pieces of the puzzle together, along with information on speeds and efficiencies. Cisco understands this important customer need extremely well, and the Cisco Validated Design (CVD) Program is designed to exactly meet this requirements. CVDs provide detailed information on the recommended solution architecture (i.e. the best possible way to put all the pieces of the puzzle together), along with guidelines on how the solution can be scaled without introducing negative tradeoffs. These architecture and scalability guidelines are based on the input from customers and Cisco/partner field architects, several months of end to end solution design and testing in our labs across the globe, jointly done by experts across Cisco and our open ecosystem partners. Detailed information on the CVD program can be found here.

Here is a consolidated list of all the existing Datacenter/Virtualization/Cloud focused CVDs jointly developed by Cisco and our open ecosystem partners.

This is just the “initial list”. I plan to keep this list up to date as we continue to roll out new CVDs that not only provide infrastructure level architecture guidelines, but also details on how to successfully layer the mission critical business applications on top of the Cisco and our open ecosystem partner based cloud infrastructures stacks. Stay tuned!

As always, feedback is highly appreciated. We would love to hear your thoughts on the CVDs you would like to see in the future…anything and everything that would help accelerate your cloud journey!

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